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by fuckHNtho
1285 days ago
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certainly the need to exaggerate the news has crept through all facets of media in this annoying "attention is our commodity" era. even the most "boring" outlet has its more subtle versions of the cringey YT "wow face" thumbnail. but just because fusion energy will not be responsible for warming your frozen pizza next week does not mean we need to belittle a major milestone like this one. sure some damn reporter has a quota to hit and metrics to game. it just means we need to dedicate a bit more effort to read the article, read between the lines, and apply critical thinking. this is the dream technology of the far future we're talking about. it doesnt even need to happen for 1000 years. if we nail it we are set for Billions of years. but obviously people are not accustomed or incentivized to think about things on that sort of timeline. |
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When everything is presented as a "major milestone" then the term starts to lose meaning. Those with finite resources need to use imperfect heuristics to decide when to spend those resources, including the time and energy required to "read between the lines and apply critical thinking" For the majority of Gen X, "major milestone in fusion energy" has gotten the bogobit enabled by this point.
> this is the dream technology of the far future we're talking about. it doesnt even need to happen for 1000 years. if we nail it we are set for Billions of years. but obviously people are not accustomed or incentivized to think about things on that sort of timeline.
The main two issues I see with this are:
1. Maintaining a civilization capable of performing fusion research for 1000 years is an open problem
2. The estimates for how long fusion energy will last us are wildly optimistic. When you say "billions" I hear "maybe several thousand." At one point there was enough petroleum on this planet to replace all the whale-oil in use for thousands of years, and look at where we are now. Providing energy for several thousand years is great! But if we are going to think about "that sort of timeline" then fusion is a bridge-technology and with the improvements in renewables and chemical energy storage over my lifetime (which have been nothing short of astonishing!), I'm starting to suspect that it's an unneeded bridge.